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Historically, there has been currency devaluation where governments have printed a massive amount of money, or they have a prolonged period of interest rates being below the inflation rate. So, they slowly chip away your wealth over time. In those periods, those scarcer assets tend to do very well. Thus, whether it is gold, silver, equities. real estate or in this case Bitcoin, I think going back to the history of fiat devaluation and why they tend to happen, why they don’t happen in some periods but do in other time frames is important.

WBTC is a product of BitGo, one of the oldest players in the industry. Kiarash Mosayeri, Product Manager at BitGo, explains what the WBTC product is all about, and how it is connected to other E...

I started on Wall Street in the 1980s as a stockbroker. I was in Los Angeles in the 1990s, and I invented a technology for digital scarcity as part of a currency that I invented for an exchange I launched. The exchange was for trading mediate derivatives that I also invented as part of what became known as the prediction market industry. So, I did all that in the 1990s. Then, we sold out to a bank in 2001, and later I started Bitcoin in 2011 at a dollar, and we have been talking about it now for almost 11 years. I saw it as a more perfect technological solution for digital scarcity.

Back in 2011, Strule Sunde, who is like a legend in the crypto community in Norway, started to sell bitcoin through local bitcoins and his homepage and communicated with the buyers through IRC chats. IRC's are the old chatting apps, and he has been serving Norway with bitcoin liquidity, exchanging between Norwegian Krone and BTC ever since. He has been in a big court case, suing Nordea, which is the biggest bank in Norden, for shutting down his account only because he was dealing with bitcoin. So, he was helping a lot of people get on board with it. Many people that were tech-enthusiasts also started to mine as soon as they read about it on e.g. Reddit. Many of them tested out some mining strategies using a GPU, or just an ordinary CPU on their computers.

I stumbled upon Bitcoin 6 years ago. I had heard about it, and even bought and sold a little bit, but I didn’t really understand it. At that time, I used to work in the advertising industry in London. I decided to take a year off because I needed some time for myself. I had spent my whole life working, and needed a break. That was 3 years ago, and during that time how I fell into the rabbit hole and got serious about it. Besides being a podcaster today, I have a very ordinary life as a single dad with two kids, and most of my time is spent looking after them. I do school-runs, get their lunch ready, iron their school clothes, and so on. We are big Liverpool fans, so the three of us usually watch football together. I also like horrible heavy metal, like the worst screaming kind that nobody likes.

The first thing you need to understand about the Russian crypto community is that it is not only Russia. When we refer to the Russian crypto community, we are talking about Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, which are the main countries, as well as other Russian speaking regions like Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Estonia, Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. These countries have a lot of historical connections. Sometimes, a reference to “Similarity” may harm or trigger some people due to political reasons. So, the Russian crypto community includes the countries that in any way are affected or involved with Russian culture.

It all started from this paper that we received from a team known as Team Rocket, who had been working on novel consensus protocol.My students and I were already exploring lighter weight protocols than Nakamoto and Classical consensus to find unique approaches nobody had explored before, but that could still provide the same guarantees as Bitcoin. We reviewed the paper draft from Team Rocket, and quickly realized that we were on to a big breakthrough.Avalanche didn’t rely on proof-of-work or mining, but used probabilistic consensus based on sub-sampling. It could be secure and predictable like Bitcoin, but didn’t suffer the centralization or performance trade-off inherent in Classical consensus approaches.

The number one reason why I am a Bitcoin fan is because of the Cantillon effect. Richard Cantillon was an Irish-French economist in the 18th century writing in the 1750s. He described what is now described as the Cantillon effect; when you print money, you debase the purchasing power of the units that are currently existing. Hence, if a person is saving up rupees or dollars, and she is putting it under her mattress every day, there will not be much value. As long as the central bank in Mumbai is printing, her hard-earned savings are being depreciated, whether she wants that or not. What the Cantillon effect discusses is that, if all the money in the economy was equally debased at the same time, that might be fairer, and this is the number one reason to use bitcoin.

I took over the Bitcoin Association meet-up in 2012. During the 2013 bubble period, the community grew rapidly due to the price explosion. Bitcoin transformed into this being on a world stage for the first time, and that was quite a ride. The community and the Hong Kong ecosystem transformed massively due to this growing new industry. If we just take a minute and rewind 2012~13, we can see how it has developed till today.

Sale of Crypto Assets. 1BTC purchased for 500,000 Yen and sold for 1 million Yen = 500,00Yen profit. Purchasing Goods with Crypto Assets. 1BTC purchased at a rate of 1BTC=500,000 Yen, and buying a TV for 1 million Yen when the rate 1BTC is 1 million Yen, means a profit of 500,000 Yen has been generated. Exchanges between Crypto Assets. Purchasing 1 BTC for 500,000Yen, and exchange it for 50ETH when the rate of 1ETH is 20,000Yen (In total 1 million Yen) = 500,000 Yen profit generated. Crypto Assets Split (Forking). The purchasing cost of the newly acquired crypto asset shall be 0 Yen at the time of purchase. Profit generation will incur at the time of sale or use. Crypto Asset Mining etc., Earnings will be generated at the market value at the time of acquisition of crypto assets acquired through mining, and this amount shall be the cost of acquisition. In case you sold the acquired crypto assets through mining afterwards, profit or loss will be generated by the balance of price of the crypto assets value at time of sale and the cost of acquisition when the sale is made.